Tags: america

I think of myself of as an optimist. It makes me insufferable sometimes.

When someone is having a moan about something in the news and they say something like “people are terrible”, I can’t resist weighing in with a “well, actually…” Then I’ll start channeling Rutger Bregman, Rebecca Solnit, and Hans Rosling, pointing to all the evidence that people are, by and large, decent. I should really just read the room and shut up.

I opened my talk Of Time And The Web with a whole spiel about how we seem to be hard-wired to pay more attention to bad news than good (perhaps for valid evolutionary reasons).

I like to think that my optimism is rational, backed up by data. But if I’m going to be rational, then I also can’t become too attached to any particualar position (like, say, optimism). I should be willing to change my mind when I’m confronted with new evidence.

A truckload of new evidence got dumped on my psyche this week. The United States of America elected Donald Trump as president. Again.

Even here I found a small glimmer of a bright side: at least the result was clear cut. I was dreading weeks or even months of drawn-out ballot counting, lawsuits and uncertainty. At least the band-aid was decisively ripped away.

Back in 2016, I could tell myself all sorts of reasons why this might have happened. Why people might have been naïve or misled into voting a dangerous idiot into power. But the naïveté was all mine. The majority of America really is that sexist.

This feels very different to 2016. And hey, remember when we woke up to that election result and one of the first things we did was take out subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post to “support real journalism”? Yeah, that worked out just great, didn’t it?

My faith in human nature is taking quite a hit. An electoral experiment has been run three times now—having this mysogistic racist narcissistic idiot run for the highest office in the land—and the same result came up twice.

I naïvely thought that the more people saw of his true nature, the less chance he would have. When he kept going off-script at his rallies, spouting the vilest of threats, I thought there was an upside. At least now people would see for themselves what he’s really like.

But in the end it didn’t matter one whit. Like I said in a different context:

To use an outdated movie reference, imagine a raving Charlton Heston shouting that “Soylent Green is people!”, only to be met with indifference. “Everyone knows Soylent Green is people. So what?”

I never liked talking about “faith” in human nature. To me, it wasn’t faith. It was just a rational assessment. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe I need some faith after all.

I wonder if my optimism will return. It probably will (see? I’m such an optimist). But if it does, perhaps it will have to be an optimism that exists despite the data, not because of it.

Seattle Samurai Book

Kelly has made a beautiful book:

Experience the lives of the first Japanese Americans in the Pacific Northwest through the cartoons and illustrations by Sam Goto

American-on-American Action Abroad: Sorry For Travel Writing At You

I have been to Brighton, and seen the summer here, and have concluded that Britons must never be permitted to have summer again. It was as hot and wet as God’s lungs, and there was a man playing the banjo on a beach with no sand. A seagull screamed at me with the voice of a human baby.

Notes From An Emergency

But real problems are messy. Tech culture prefers to solve harder, more abstract problems that haven’t been sullied by contact with reality. So they worry about how to give Mars an earth-like climate, rather than how to give Earth an earth-like climate. They debate how to make a morally benevolent God-like AI, rather than figuring out how to put ethical guard rails around the more pedestrian AI they are introducing into every area of people’s lives.

Two Irish Girls Who Made It to New York - The New York Times

Maeve Higgins must’ve been back in Cobh (our hometown) at the same time this Christmas. Here she tells the story of Annie Moore, the first person to enter the doors at Ellis Island.

I stood on the darkening quay side in Cobh on Christmas Eve, and looked at a statue of Annie there. She seems small and capable, her hands lightly resting on her little brothers’ shoulders, gazing back at a country she would never see again. An Irish naval ship had returned to the harbor earlier that week from its mission off the Mediterranean coast, a mission that has rescued 15,000 people from the sea since May 2015, though 2016 was still the deadliest one for migrants crossing the Mediterranean since World War II.

Code for America — Responsive Web Design on Huffduffer

This was a fun podcast—myself and Cyd from Code For America talk to Karen and Ethan about how we worked together. Good times.

The audio is available for your huffduffing pleasure.

Here at Clearleft, we’ve been doing some extra work with Code for America following on from our initial deliverables. This makes me happy for a number of reasons:

1. They’re a great client—really easy-going and fun to work with.
2. We’ve got Anna back in the office and it’s always nice to have her around.
3. We get to revisit the styleguide we provided, and test our assumptions.

That last one is important. When we provide a pattern library to a client, we hope that they’ve got everything they need. If we’ve done our job right, then they’ll be able to combine patterns in ways we haven’t foreseen to create entirely new page types.

For the most part, that’s been the case with Code for America. They have a solid set of patterns that are serving them well. But what’s been fascinating is to hear about what it’s like for the people using those patterns…

There’s been a welcome trend in recent years towards extremely robust, maintainable CSS. SMACSS, BEM, OOCSS and other methodologies might differ in their details, but their fundamental approach is pretty similar. The idea is that you apply a very specific class to every element you want to style:

<div class="thingy">
    <ul class="thingy-bit">
        <li class="thingy-bit-item"></li>
        <li class="thingy-bit-item"></li>
    </ul>
    <img class="thingy-wotsit" src="" alt="" />
</div>

That allows you to keep your CSS selectors very short, but very specific:

.thingy {}
.thingy-bit {}
.thingy-bit-item {}
.thingy-wotsit {}

There’s little or no nesting, and you only ever use class selectors. That keeps your CSS nice and clear, and you avoid specificity hell. The catch is that your HTML is necessarily more verbose: you need to explicitly add a class to whatever you want to style.

For most projects—particularly product work (think Twitter, Facebook, etc.)—that’s a completely acceptable trade-off. It’s usually the same developers editing the CSS and the HTML so there’s no problem moving complexity out of CSS and into the markup templates. Even if other people will be entering the actual content into the system, they’ll probably be doing that mediated through a Content Management System, rather than editing HTML directly.

So nine times out of ten, making the HTML more verbose is absolutely the right choice in order to make the CSS more manageable and maintainable. That’s the way we initially built the pattern library for Code for America.

Well, it turns out that the people using the markup patterns aren’t necessarily the same people who would be dealing with the CSS. Also, there isn’t necessarily a CMS involved. Instead, people (volunteers, employees, anyone really) create new pages by copying and pasting the patterns we’ve provided and then editing them.

By optimising on the CSS side of things, we’ve offloaded a lot of complexity onto their shoulders. While it’s fair enough to expect them to understand basic HTML, it’s hardly fair to expect them to learn a whole new vocabulary of thingy and thingy-wotsit class names just to get things to look they way they expect.

Here’s a markup pattern that makes more sense for the people actually dealing with the HTML:

<div class="thingy">
    <ul>
        <li></li>
        <li></li>
    </ul>
    <img src="" alt="" />
</div>

Much clearer. But now the CSS looks like this:

.thingy {}
.thingy ul {}
.thingy li {}
.thingy img {}

Actually it’s probably going to look more complicated than that: more nesting, more element selectors, more “defensive” rules trying to anticipate the kind of markup that might be used in a particular pattern.

It feels really strange for Anna and myself to work with these kind of patterns. All of our experience screams “Don’t do that! Why would you that?” …but in this case, it’s the right thing to do for the people building the actual website.

So please don’t interpret this as me saying “Hey, everyone, this is how you should write your CSS.” I’m not saying this is better or worse than adding lots of classes to your HTML. If anything, this illustrates that there is no one right way to do this.

It’s worth remembering why we’re aiming for maintainability in what we write. It’s not for any technical reason. It’s for people. If those people find it better to deal with simplified CSS with more complex HTML, than the complexity should be in the HTML. But if the priority for those people is to have simple HTML, then more complex CSS may be an acceptable price to pay.

In other words, it depends.

I’m in America. This is a three-week trip and in those three weeks, I’m speaking at four conferences.

That might sound like a fairly hectic schedule but it’s really not that bad at all. In each place I’m travelling to, travel takes up a day, the conference portion takes up a couple of days, but I still get a day or two to just hang out and be a tourist, which is jolly nice.

This sojourn began in Boston where I was speaking at An Event Apart. It was—as ever—an excellent event and even though I was just speaking at An Event Apart in Seattle just a few weeks ago, there were still plenty of fresh talks for me to enjoy in Boston: Paul talking about performance, Lea talking about colour in CSS, Dan talking about process, and a barnstorming talk from Bruce on everything that makes the web great (although I respectfully disagree with his stance on DRM/EME).

My own talk was called The Long Web and An Event Apart Boston was its final outing. I first gave it at An Event Apart DC back in August—it’s had a good nine-month run.

My next appearance at An Event Apart will be at the end of this American trip in San Diego. I’ll be presenting a new talk there. Whereas my previous talk was a rambling affair about progressive enhancement, responsive design, and long-term thinking, my new talk will be a rambling affair about progressive enhancement, responsive design, and long-term thinking.

Sooner or later people are going to realise that I keep hammering home the same message in all my talks and this whole speaking-at-conferences gig will dry up. Until then, I’ll keep hammering home that same old message.

I have two opportunities to road-test this new talk before An Event Apart San Diego (for which, by the way, tickets still remain: use the code AEAKEITH when you’re booking to get $100 off).

I’ll be speaking at Bmoresponsive in Baltimore at the end of this week. Before that, I have the great pleasure (and pressure) of opening the show tomorrow at the Artifact conference here in good ol’ Austin, Texas (and believe it or not, you can still get a ticket: this time use the code ADACTIO100 when you’re booking to get $100 off).

Until then, I have some time to wander around and be a tourist. It is so nice to be here in Austin when it’s not South by Southwest. I should probably fretting over this talk but instead I’m spending my time sampling tacos and beers in the sunshine.

The Code for America project at Clearleft was fun for everyone involved. And because the code for the site is open to anyone to contribute to, the fun didn’t have to stop when the project officially wrapped up.

Because of her experience with front-end styleguides, we had hired Anna to work as a front-end developer on the Code for America project. But even when she was officially discharged of her duties, she decided to keep contributing to the public codebase.

For this service above and beyond the call of duty, Mike rewarded her in the time-honoured way: cake! In this case, the cake was inspired by the unofficial project theme song we blasted out every morning in the Clearleft HQ.

being a client (tecznotes)

Mike writes about what it was like being a client for a change. After working with him on the Code for America project, I can personally vouch for him as a dream client:

Clearleft’s pattern deliverables are the special-special that made the final work so strong. Jon Aizlewood’s introduction to the concept convinced me to contact Clearleft. Jeremy Keith’s interest in design systems kicked off the process, and Anna Debenham’s fucking rock star delivery brought it all home.

I’ve already written a bit about the process of working with Code for America, which has been an absolute pleasure. Just today, Jon described it as “the closest thing to a dream project.”

I concur. Not only did the client communication work out really well, but their willingness to share the pattern library we put together warms the cockles of my heart.

When Clearleft’s part in the project officially wrapped up, I wrote:

It’ll be a while yet before the new site rolls out.

That was exactly one month ago.

The new Code for America website went live last Friday.

I’m impressed! That’s a pretty short timescale to rebuild a fairly large website, not only changing the front-end codebase, but also switching out the back-end stack as well. They must’ve been working flat out.

I’ve worked on projects in the past where my initial excitement at the project’s wrap diminished as the site launch date slipped further and further over the horizon of the future. It isn’t unusual to have a gap of many months between the end of Clearleft’s time on a project and seeing the site go live. I’m really happy that the Code for America project bucks that trend.

Getting Started With Pattern Libraries ∙ An A List Apart Blog Post

A great post from Anna on the front-end styleguides she’s worked on for A List Apart and Code for America. ‘Twas a pleasure working with her on the Code for America project.

A-mer-ica! Fuck yeah!

Mandy has written a great article about making remote teams work. It’s an oft-neglected aspect of working on a product when you’ve got people distributed geographically.

But remote communication isn’t just something that’s important for startups and product companies—it’s equally important for agencies when it comes to client communication.

At Clearleft, we occasionally work with clients right here in Brighton, but that’s the exception. More often than not, the clients are based in London, or somewhere else in the UK. In the case of Code for America, they’re based in San Francisco—that’s eight or nine timezones away (depending on the time of year).

As it turned out, it wasn’t a problem at all. In fact, it worked out nicely. At the end of every day, we had a quick conference call, with two or three people at our end, and two or three people at their end. For us, it was the end of the day: 5:30pm. For them, the day was just starting: 9:30am.

We’d go through what we had been doing during that day, ask any questions that had cropped up over the course of the day, and let them know if there was anything we needed from them. If there was anything we needed from them, they had the whole day to put it together while we went home. The next morning (from our perspective), it would be waiting in our in/drop-boxes.

Meanwhile, from the perspective of Code for America, they were coming into the office every morning and starting the day with a look over our work, as though we had beavering away throughout the night.

Now, it would be easy for me to extrapolate from this that this way of working is great and everyone should do it. But actually, the whole timezone difference was a red herring. The real reason why the communication worked so well throughout the project was because of the people involved.

Right from the start, it was clear that because of time and budget constraints that we’d have to move fast. We wouldn’t have the luxury of debating everything in detail and getting every decision signed off. Instead we had a sort of “rough consensus and running code” approach that worked really well. It worked because everyone understood that was what was happening—if just one person was expecting a more formalised structure, I’m sure it wouldn’t have gone quite so smoothly.

So we provided materials in whatever level of fidelity made sense for the idea under discussion. Sometimes that was a quick sketch. Sometimes it was a fairly high-fidelity mockup. Sometimes it was a module of markup and CSS. Whatever it took.

Most of all, there was a great feeling of trust on both sides of the equation. It was clear right from the start that the people at Code for America were super-smart and weren’t going to make any outlandish or unreasonable requests of Clearleft. Instead they gave us just the right amount of guidance and constraints, while trusting us to make good decisions.

At one point, Jon was almost complaining about not getting pushback on his designs. A nice complaint to have.

Because of the daily transatlantic “stand up” via teleconference, there was a great feeling of inevitability to the project as it came together from idea to execution. Inevitability doesn’t sound like a very sexy attribute of a web project, but it’s far preferable to the kind of project that involves milestones of “big reveals”—the Mad Men approach to project management.

Oh, and we made sure that we kept those transatlantic calls nice and short. They never lasted longer than 10 or 15 minutes. We wanted to avoid the many pitfalls of conference calls.

Mike has written about the Code for America alpha website that we collaborated on:

We chose to work with ClearLeft because they develop a pattern portfolio (a pattern/style library) which would allow us to scale our work to our Brigades. This unique approach has aligned perfectly with our work style and decentralized organizational structure.

Thankfully, I think the approach of delivering a pattern portfolio (instead of just pages) isn’t so unique these days. Mind you, it still seems to be more common with in-house teams than agencies. The Mailchimp pattern library is a classic example.

But agencies like Paravel are—like Clearleft—delivering systems, not pages. Dave wrote about providing responsive deliverables:

Responsive deliverables should look a lot like fully-functioning Twitter Bootstrap-style systems custom tailored for your clients’ needs.

I think that’s a good way of looking at it: a Bootstrap for every project.

Here’s the front-end style guide for Code for America.

Usually these front-end deliverables will be password-protected on the Clearleft extranet for the client’s eyes only, but Code for America are all about openness, so they’re more than willing to let us share it with the world. That makes me very happy. I remember encouraging the guys at Starbucks to publish their front-end style guide and I’ve written about this spirit of sharing before:

These style guides and pattern libraries aren’t being published in an attempt to provide ready-made solutions—every project should have its own distinct pattern library. Instead, these pattern libraries are being published in a spirit of openness and sharing …a way of saying “Hey, this is what worked for us in these particular circumstances.”

If you’re poking around the Code for America style guide, you’ll notice that it borrows some ideas from the pattern primer idea I published a while back. But in this iteration, the markup is available via a toggle—a nice variation. There’s also a patchwork page that provides a nice glance-able uninterrupted view of the same patterns.

Every project is a learning experience and each front-end style guide gives us ideas about how to do the next one better. In fact, Mark is busy working on better internal tools for creating these kinds of deliverables—something we’ll definitely be sharing. In the meantime, I’ll be encouraging other clients to be as open as Code for America have been in allowing us to share these deliverables.

For more on the usefulness of front-end style guides, be sure to read Paul’s article on style guides for the web, Anna’s classic 24 Ways article, and of course, Anna’s pocket guide from Five Simple Steps.

Back when I was wandering around America in August, I mentioned that I met up with Mike Migurski in San Francisco:

I played truant from UX Week this morning to meet up with Mike for a coffee and a chat at Cafe Vega. We were turfed out when the bearded, baseball-capped, Draplinesque barista announced he had to shut the doors because he needed to “run out for some milk.” So we went around the corner to the Code For America office.

It wasn’t just a social visit. Mike wanted to chat about the possibility of working with Clearleft. The Code for America site was being overhauled. The new site needed to communicate directly with volunteers, rather than simply being a description of what Code for America does. But the site also needed to be able to change and adapt as the organisation’s activities expanded. So what they needed was not a set of page designs; they needed a system of modular components that could be assembled in a variety of ways.

This was music to my ears. This sort of systems-thinking is exactly the kind of work that Clearleft likes to get its teeth into. I showed Mike some of the previous work we had done in creating pattern libraries, and it became pretty clear that this was just what they were looking for.

When I got back to Brighton, Clearleft assembled as small squad to work on the project. Jon would handle the visual design, with the branding work of Dojo4 as a guide. For the front-end coding, we brought in some outside help. Seeing as the main deliverable for this project was going to be a front-end style guide, who better to put that together than the person who literally wrote the book on front-end style guides: Anna.

I’ll go into more detail about the technical side of things on the Clearleft blog (and we’ll publish the pattern library), but for now, let me just say that the project was a lot of fun, mostly because the people we were working with at Code for America—Mike, Dana, and Cyd—were so ridiculously nice and easy-going.

Anna and Jon would start the day by playing the unofficial project theme song and then get down to working side-by-side. By the end of the day here in Brighton, everyone was just getting started in San Francisco. So the daily “stand up” conference call took place at 5:30pm our time; 9:30am their time. The meetings rarely lasted longer than 10 or 15 minutes, but the constant communication throughout the project was invaluable. And the time difference actually worked out quite nicely: we’d tell them what we had been working on during our day, and if we needed anything from them; then they could put that together during their day so it was magically waiting for us by the next morning.

It’ll be a while yet before the new site rolls out, but in the meantime they’ve put together an alpha site—with a suitably “under construction” vibe—so that anyone can help out with the code and content by making contributions to the github repo.

I’ve just come back from a multi-hop trip to the States, spanning three cities in just over two weeks.

It started with an all-too-brief trip to San Francisco for Science Hack Day, which—as I’ve already described—was excellent. It was a shame that it was such a flying visit and I didn’t get to see many people. But then again, I’ll be back in December for An Event Apart San Francisco.

It was An Event Apart that took me to my second destination: Austin, Texas. The conference was great, as always. But was really nice was having some time afterwards to explore the town. Being in Austin when it’s not South by Southwest is an enjoyable experience that I can heartily recommend.

Christopher and Ari took me out to Lockhart to experience Smitty’s barbecue—a place with a convoluted family drama and really, really excellent smoked meat. I never really “got” Texas BBQ until now. I always thought I liked the sauced-based variety, but now I understand: if the BBQ is good enough, you don’t need the sauce.

For the rest of my stay, Sam was an excellent host, showing me around her town until it was time for me to take off for New York city.

To start with, I was in Manhattan. I was going to be speaking at Future Of Web Design right downtown on 42nd street, and I showed up a few days early to rendezvous with Jessica and do some touristing.

We perfected the cheapskate’s guide to Manhattan, exploring the New York Public Library, having Tiff show us around the New York Times, and wrangling a tour of the MoMA from Ben Fino-Radin, who’s doing some fascinating work with the digital collection.

I gave my FOWD talk, which went fine once the technical glitches were sorted out (I went through three microphones in five minutes). The conference was in a cinema, which meant my slides were giganormous. That was nice, but the event had an odd kind of vibe. Maybe it was the venue, or maybe it was the two-track format …I really don’t like two-track conferences; I constantly feel like I’m missing out on something.

I skipped out on the second day of the conference to make my way over the bridge to Brooklyn in time for my third trip to Brooklyn Beta.

This year, they tried something quite different. For the first two days, there was a regular Brooklyn Beta: 300 lovely people gathered together at the Invisible Dog, ostensibly to listen to talks but in reality to hang out and chat. It was joyous.

Then on the third and final day, those 300 people decamped to Brooklyn’s Navy Yard to join a further 1000 people. There we heard more talks and had more chats.

Alas, the acoustics in the hangar-like space battled against the speakers. That’s why I made sure to grab a seat near the front for the afternoon talks. I found myself with a front-row seat for a series of startup stories and app tales. Then, without warning, the tech talks were replaced with stand-up comics. The comedians were very, very good (Reggie Watts!) …but I found it hard to pay attention because I realised I was in a living nightmare: somehow I was in the front-row seat of a stand-up comedy show. I spent the entire time thinking “Please don’t pick on me, please don’t pick on me, please don’t…” I couldn’t sneak out either, because that would’ve only drawn attention to myself.

But apart from confronting me with my worst fears, Brooklyn Beta was great …I’m just not sure it scales well from 300 to 1300.

And with that, my American sojourn came to an end. I’m glad that the stars aligned in such a way that I was able to hit up four events in my 16 day trip:

• Science Hack Day San Francisco,
• An Event Apart Austin,
• Future Of Web Design New York, and
• Brooklyn Beta 2013.

My last day in Chicago was short and uneventful. After a late check-out from the hotel, Jessica and I wandered down to Intelligentsia, had some coffee, wandered off for some lunch, wandered back to Intelligentsia for even more coffee, before wandering back to the hotel to kill time before leaving.

Brad was leaving around the same time so we shared a ride out to the airport, which went pretty smoothly considering Chicago’s infamous traffic. We made it to O’Hare in plenty of time, breezed through security and hung out in the lounge until our flight was ready for boarding.

Thus endeth my August in America.

I’m pleased that I was able to live out of a medium-sized suitcase for such an extended period.

I’m pleased that I didn’t use a byte of data on my phone for the whole trip—the trick with the offline maps helped a lot.

I’m pleased that I was able to keep my promise to myself to document the trip by writing a journal entry every day I was in America …well, except for this one, which I’m writing from my home in Brighton. But hey, 25 out of 26 ain’t bad.

Today was the second day of An Event Apart Chicago and I kicked things off with my talk The Long Web. But this time I introduced a new variable into the mix—I played a bit of mandolin.

It was relevant …honest. I was talking about the redesign and relaunch of The Session, which involved giving a bit of background on traditional Irish music, so it seemed appropriate to demonstrate with a hornpipe. I screwed it up a little bit, but people didn’t seem to mind.

Once I was done with my talk, I was able to relax and enjoy an excellent presentation by Adrian on interface details; lots of great food for thought in there.

Once the day was done, myself, Jessica, Jason, Ethan, Brad, Kristina, and Karen made our way to The Purple Pig, where we proceeded to eat all the food. Excellent food and excellent company; a good way to spend my last night in Chicago …and indeed, the United States.

Tomorrow I begin the journey home.

Today was the opening day of An Event Apart Chicago so I spent the whole day at the back of the room absorbing the knowledge bombs being dropped.

As usual, the quality of the talks was excellent, and quite a few of them set me up nicely for my talk tomorrow. I’ll be reiterating a lot of what Ethan said about progressive enhancement—no surprise there.

I’m on first thing tomorrow. That’s the hangover slot (thanks for booze, Media Temple). I’m kind of nervous about the talk. Now that I’ve given it once already—at An Event Apart DC earlier this month—I shouldn’t be worried, but I’m going to attempt something a bit new tomorrow. If it doesn’t work, I’ll be left with egg on my face.

Wish me luck.

Powers Of Ten is a remarkable short film created by Charles and Ray Eames in 1968. It deals with scale, going out to the distance of our galactic neighbourhood and down to the Planck measurement.

It all begins in a park in Chicago.

Ever since first seeing the film I thought it would be fun to find the exact spot around which the universe is explored by the Eameses. I also thought I probably wasn’t the first geek to think that. But my preliminary googling didn’t turn up any prior art. So I put the call out on Twitter:

Geocoders of the lazyweb: I’m trying to figure out the exact lat/lon coordinates of the Eames’ “Powers Of Ten” http://t.co/1lFnZAvm4V Go!

— Jeremy Keith (@adactio) August 25, 2013

Within minutes, Matthew came through for me:

@adactio The park's been remodelled, but it's somewhere about (41.864726,-87.613471).

— Matthew Somerville (@dracos) August 25, 2013

Although, as Dan pointed out, that opening shot was actually filmed in LA:

The actual live action of the picnic scene was filmed in Los Angeles, where Charles and Ray could oversee all aspects of production for the critical opening moments.

Nonetheless, armed with latitude and longitude coordinates, Jessica and I set out to find the one metre square patch of Chicago that’s used as the starting point for the film. We began the trek from our riverside hotel, stopping for an Intelligentsia coffee along the way, passing by the bean to take obligatory mirror shots, and through Millenium Park down to the Field Museum and the Schedd Aquarium, the perfect spot to stop for a Chicago-style hot dog.

With a bit more walking, we made it to the lat/lon coordinates—a more arboreal location now than it was back when Powers Of Ten was filmed. I did what any self-respecting nerd in my situation would do: I made a new spot on Foursquare.

Mission accomplished. After that, we hopped on a water taxi back up to Navy Pier. This short boat ride made Jessica inordinately happy. It certainly was a lovely day to be out on the water. ‘Though I had to keep reminding myself that we were on a lake, not an ocean.

When we got back to our hotel, we asked at reception if there might be a riverside view that we could move to. There was and we did. Now when we look out of our hotel window, we can see the stunning architecture of downtown Chicago in all its glory.